What do fraternities exist for?
Promising assistance and support when needed, belongingness, and brotherly love, fraternities continue to thrive and multiply through the years.
But what happens when that promise of affection instead brings death to someone in what the members call family?
Hazing, an often-deadly initiation ritual conducted by fraternities, led to numerous deaths of innocent students seeking camaraderie into the fold of these violence-marred organizations luring members in the name of brotherhood.
There’s this so-called anti-hazing law but it has not been proactively implemented.
Young people are still dying. A senator, himself a member of a popular fraternity, has called on his fellow lawmakers to re-visit the law.
The anti-hazing law is rendered inutile because it does not nip the bud of the problem.
Some fraternity groups are notorious for provoking clashes against frat rivals. In some instances, they prey on hapless students who don’t have any frat connections.
While some schools have declared a ban on fraternities inside their campuses, there is a lax implementation that frat members can still freely recruit innocent prospects.
What’s worse is that there are teachers who are senior frat members themselves and are responsible for recruiting their students.
The death due to the hazing of a student from Adamson University and another from the University of Cebu have put the anti-hazing to the test once again. Is it really working to make our sons and daughters safe in school?
The law should start with identifying gangster-type fraternities from the real civic-centered organizations and those which have a history of violence should be banned, as in totally banned.
A mere mention of the frat’s name or mere possession of its insignia should cause an investigation by the school and subsequent expulsion.
And no teacher or school official should be a member of any banned fraternity group.
The law should be harsh to deter violence in schools which are supposed to be a house of education and not a center of recruitment for sadistic gangs masquerading as brotherhood organizations.